Michael Gorman asks, in the second part of his essay “Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason,” “Is the astonishing spread of computer technology to change not just our society and personal lives but also the very nature of human intelligence?” I believe he intends the question to be rhetorical, but I’m going to go ahead and give it an answer: Yes. As the networked computer becomes our universal medium (revealing the television to be merely a transitional device), it’s going to change the nature of human intelligence just as surely as the printed page did a half a millennium ago. Our brains aren’t constructed of wires and solder. They’re made of softer stuff – and they’re always ready to be reprogrammed.

So while I’m happy to line up on Gorman’s side in battling the hive mind fabulists, I’m not going to kid myself that it’s anything more than a sideshow. We’re not going to see the rise of a superior collective intelligence – those awaiting a higher consciousness will end up, as always, either disappointed or deluded – but neither are we going to see the survival of a way of thinking shaped by the careful arrangement of words on printed pages. Contemplative Man, the fellow who came to understand the world sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, is a goner. He’s being succeeded by Flickering Man, the fellow who darts from link to link, conjuring the world out of continually refreshed arrays of isolate pixels, shadows of shadows. The linearity of reason is blurring into the nonlinearity of impression; after five centuries of wakefulness, we’re lapsing into a dream state. Here comes everybody, indeed.

What’s happening here isn’t about amateurs and professionals. George Washington was an amateur politician. Charles Darwin was an amateur scientist. Wallace Stevens was an amateur poet. Talent cannot be classified; it’s an individual trait. What’s happening here isn’t even really about expertise or its absence. The decisive factor is not how we produce intellectual works but how we consume them. When Gorman says we must cherish “the individual scholar, author, and creator of knowledge,” I can wholeheartedly agree (as most people would) and still believe that he’s missing the point. The millions of people who consult Wikipedia every day are not pursuing any kind of anti-expert or anti-scholar agenda. Their interest is practical, not ideological. They go to Wikipedia because it’s free and convenient. They know its quality and reliability are imperfect, but that’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make as they hurriedly fill their market baskets with information. It’s our mode of consumption that is going to shape our intellectual lives and even, in time, our intellects. And that mode is shifting, rapidly and inexorably, from page to web.

George Dyson, in his book Darwin Among the Machines, quotes the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane: “Evolution will take its course. And that course has generally been downward. The majority of species have degenerated and become extinct, or, what is perhaps worse, gradually lost many of their functions. The ancestors of oysters and barnacles had heads. Snakes have lost their limbs and ostriches and penguins their power of flight. Man may just as easily lose his intelligence.” The automation of physical labor did not make our muscles bigger. Are we to assume that the automation of mental labor will make our brains smarter?

When Sergey Brin said that “the perfect search engine would be like the mind of God,” he was neither hyperventilating nor blaspheming. He was giving us a peek at the future. We get the God we deserve.